One of the key features in WordPress 4.4 is responsive images. Joe McGill, who is helping to merge the feature to core, explains how it works through interview. When users upload images in WordPress, it automatically crops new images to smaller sizes. Additional sizes are created depending on the theme. If the full size image is attached to a post, users on desktop and mobile devices will see the full size image. Responsive images in WordPress 4.4 add srcset and sizes support to WordPress. This allows software to automatically use and display the right image based on a device’s screen size. Responsive image don’t have any settings to configure as the magic happens behind the scenes.

In today’s business generation, age is not an important qualification in starting a business, as long as you have the determination and hard work you can be an entrepreneur anytime. Devesh Sharma is one the example, he is the founder of wpkube.com and started his business at 15 years of age. So the interview goes this way:

You started this field at a very young age of 15, what made you got here? Do you plan this journey or was it incidental?

I realized early on that I didn’t want to do a 9-5 job in my life; neither did I want to run a business just to make money. So I started looking for unique ways to make money / start business, and found a dozen of sites talking about making money online with Adsense.

After a year of learning and experimenting, I started my first business blog called Technshare, which I later sold for 4-figures.

Now I manage a fairly popular WordPress resource site called WPKube.

You are the founder of WPKube, how and when this company founded?

In early days I ran a small WordPress consultancy business. Plus WordPress was a topic that I use to write a lot about on my business blog. So it was natural progression to start a business around WordPress.

The company was founded in 2010 with the goal to provide in-depth tutorials, how-to guides, and other useful resources to WordPress users.

What were your stepping stones in starting this business and to maintain its success? Tell us your experiences.

Another stepping stone was expanding the wpkube team. I don’t think I would be where I am today without the help and support of my team.

Aside from working with WordPress, what are the other things you would love to do?

I’d love to experiment with Amazon FBA and building iOS apps.

As a WordPress expert working with several years, how do you foresee WPKube in the next three to five years?

More free resources for the WordPress community.

I’m working hard on some new products that I plan to release this year, one of them is Coupons plugin called CoupineWP. I’m also experimenting with ThemeForest to see how products perform there; so far the results look very promising.

Our technical colleagues at Clef got in touch with us and we finally managed to publish the interview with them. Clef is a wonderful product that enables two-factor integration with your WordPress website, and is also available for all of you hosted with our friends on a SiteGround Managed WordPress Hosting.

Tell us a bit about yourself and how did you get involved with WordPress?

Hi everyone! My name is Jesse and I’m one of the founders and the head of product at Clef. Essentially, that means that I get to talk to our users every day and lead development on all things you interact with. It’s awesome. Before Clef, I was in school at Pomona College, but I dropped out after two-years to focus full time on killing passwords.

The first time I used WordPress was in my junior year of high school. We had a newspaper, but one of my friends and I wanted something that students could actually interact with in a real-time way. We decided to create a blog, and I decided to run it on WordPress. We eventually grew to having ~7 writers and I was super impressed with how easy it was to manage everyone and everything with WordPress. Pretty great introduction. I used WordPress on-and-off after that to build websites and when we started Clef I knew it was the first platform we had to build for.

How was the Clef idea born – what were you struggling with prior to building Clef?

Clef actually came out of a bunch of work that our CEO, Brennen, did. Back in 2011, he was working at Adobe on their Strategic Alliances team right after Steve Jobs wrote the letter that killed flash on the iPhone. Since companies like Adobe used flash to identify users for partner advertising, he was part of a team that was tasked with figuring out new ways to identify users on mobile devices. Around that time, LinkedIn had, what was at the time, the largest password breach ever (an event we think of as the beginning of the “era of breaches”). Brennen saw the juxtaposition of the failure of passwords with all the work he was doing on mobile identity, and realized that our phones could do a *much* better job of identifying us (both security and usability-wise) than the username and password infrastructure. He went back to school at Pomona, started working with a professor studying security through usability, and wrote a thesis on phone-based identification. Eventually, he recruited Mark (our CTO) and I to join the project and we turned his thesis into Clef. A year later, we moved up to the Bay Area and launched the product.

If you were to explain to a blogger or a non-technical user Clef, what would be the key selling point (in a sentence or two)?

Going to break the rules and do two selling points here: security and usability. With Clef, you never have to remember passwords for your WordPress sites again *and* every site is protected by two-factor authentication that will keep you safe from all the brute-force breaches you’re hearing about in the news.

Are there any hosting restrictions or limitations, for example is it applicable for shared hosting customers, too?

Nope! Clef will work on any WordPress site out there (and if you have any issues, just email us at support@getclef.com and we’ll get the problem resolved ASAP).

How about the more technical users? What is the complete flow of Clef, do you store any sensitive information on your servers?

Clef wraps a technology called public-key cryptography. Developers have been using public-key cryptography to identify themselves for the last 20 years (every time you push code to Github or SSH into a server, you’re almost certainly using it). In our architecture, the “private keys” (the valuable credential information) are generated, encrypted, and stored on the phone — they never leave. The only things we store are the “public keys,” which are used to verify your identity, but can’t be used to impersonate you. Even if all of them were exposed, an attacker would be no closer to logging in as you. This distributed architecture eliminates all of the attacks we commonly see against passwords and makes the economics of compromising users much less viable for attackers. Rather than being able to hack a database and get millions of passwords (which they could sell for a fraction of a cent each), they’d have to target every user individually.

How safe is that second step verification process in practice, relying on a separate device?

Very. The great thing about our second-factor (the PIN) is that the only way it’s vulnerable is if an attacker already has your device. If you ever lose your phone, you can just go online and deactivate to render it useless for logging in with Clef — in the meantime, your PIN protects you from an attacker trying to impersonate you.

What are the future plans for Clef? Would you follow the freemium model, or switch to paid packages for all of your plans?

Clef will always be free for WordPress users and sites — we all love the community so much and think that it’s really important to increase the default level of security for new WordPress users. Limiting that goes against our values.

In the next year, we’re going to be expanding our platform beyond one-click installations like WordPress and into more consumer-facing login pages like the ones you use every day (think financial and health online services). We’ll be building our the necessary APIs, documentation, and developer tools to make custom integrations really easy and then working with early stage companies to offer low-cost, super usable two-factor authentication. If you’re reading this and that perks your interest, shoot me an email at jesse@getclef.com.

Anything else that you’d like to share with our readers?

I’m always around on twitter at @jessepollak and by email at jesse@getclef.com — if you have any questions, or need any help getting setup with Clef, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Our friends at WP Rocket have launched a special promotional campaign for all readers of Premium WordPress Support! Use the premiumwpsupport15 for 15% discount while registering for the WP Rocket caching and performance optimization plugin. The code is only valid for the first 5 registered users, so sign up now!

We have interviewed Jean-Baptiste, one of the founders of WP Rockets, who has shared his experience building the business and the plugin itself.

1. Hey Jean-Baptiste, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for Premium WordPress Support. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Hey, thank you for having me 🙂
I’m Jean-Baptiste, cofounder of WP Rocket with my 2 partners Jonathan and Julio. I’m a WordPress addict since many years ago.
I manage the communication, the promotion of WP Rocket and all the servers stuff.

2. You are behind the WP Rocket team – how did you end up building a caching and performance optimization plugin and what does the team look like?

Jonathan and I are web performance nerds. For many months we have been looking to offer a service in the field of web performance. About one and a half year ago, Jonathan published a tutorial on his blog : How to Create a Cache System on WordPress.
It’s a little script which provides a simple alternative to the existing caching plugins.
Following the craze around the cache script we decided to go further, and the idea of WP Rocket was born as a premium WordPress plugin.

Today we are three in the team :

– Jonathan, a WordPress developer. He codes most of the plugin
– Julio, a WordPress developer and security expert. He codes all the security stuff (the validation key for example)
– Jean-Baptiste, I manage the communication, the promotion and our servers

3. How does WP Rocket compare to other competitors in the market such as W3 Total Cache ot WP Super Cache?

Our main philosophy for WP Rocket is simplicity and efficiency.
Other Caching Plugins give so much options that it’s a pain in the ass to configure them.

According to the WordPress philosophy we follow the Decision Not Options rule :

« When making decisions these are the users we consider first. A great example of this consideration is software options. Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration »

WP Rocket has only a few options, we make the decision for our customer to enable 80% of the best web performance practice upon the plugin activation. Then through a fancy administration he can modify basic and advanced options.

WP Rocket has a lots of exclusive functionalities, such as:

– Lazy Load in native JavaScript
– A White Label option
– A clever cache preloading. Once your update a post or your cache has expired, our robots will come to your site to automatically preload the cache files

Then we have a great support team to help our customers if they have an issue.

4. Could you share the most common issues or support requests you’ve been struggling with when it comes to your existing client base?

The most common issue is about JS and CSS minification. It’s really hard to perfectly handle the minification. For example with the JS minification, if a « ; » is missing at the end of a JS file the minification won’t properly work.
That’s why it’s possible to exclude some files from the minification, and we help on the support our customers to do it 🙂

5. What does the future hold for WP Rocket?

We are working very hard to give our customers new killing features with WP Rocket over our next updates 🙂
Each day more and more websites are using WP Rocket, it’s very motivating for us.
In the very short term we are moving in 3 months to San Francisco to meet the WordPress community there and do some partnerships as well.

Sign up with premiumwpsupport15 and get your 15% discount for WP Rocket now!